Processing plants for processing granular material are used in many fields. In some instances, the processing plants may be fixed installations or portable installations.
In some processing plants, the processing plant may include processing equipment used to separate a granular material into different grades of material based on a characteristic of the product, such as size as well as to remove impurities. For instance, a processing plant may be used to sort and separate sand into different size sand particles. Similarly, a processing plant may be used to separate seeds, such as seed corn or seed beans, into different size, while removing impurities such as weed seeds (i.e. seeds for undesired plant species) or waste material (e.g. remnants of the plant from which the seeds where harvested).
The processing plant may also include processing equipment to then recombine the previously sorted product to form a desired product that has a desired ratio of the previously sorted product. The processing plant may also add other components to the desired product, such as in a concrete or asphalt manufacturing processing plant.
Due to, in part, environmental conditions, some processing plants are only used seasonally. For instance, processing plants that process sand or other construction materials may only operate during the summer in the northern Midwest states of the United States when corresponding construction activities occur.
While small scale/portable processing plants exist, for larger production areas, processing plants that can process large quantities of product are typically formed as fixed installations using substantially permanent structures. This reduces the cost benefit of the large processing plants that cannot be transported to other locations either for seasonal purposes or that can be transported to a new cite upon completion of a job causing the demand for the processing plant to cease. For instance, processing plants for dry screening activities are typically never moved and are fixed installations such that a super majority of the capital investment in the facility is lost upon termination of the use of the processing plant.
Another issue with current processing plants relates to the fact that many of these processing plants process product that is extremely heavy or voluminous such that transportation costs of the product can be extremely high. For instance, for sand processing plants, merely moving a plant five to ten miles so as to follow a construction job can reduce transportation costs. However, as noted above, many of the processing plants large enough for those types of jobs have yet to be developed that can be easily transported so as to eliminate significant downtime and transportation costs of the processing plant itself.
Additionally, upon failure or even predetermined maintenance intervals of many of the processing equipment of a processing plant, replacement, repair or maintenance activities can be extremely difficult due to the limited space available around the processing equipment with the processing plant's structural skeleton coupled with the typically large size of the parts of the processing equipment. The difficulty for maintenance is often multiplied merely for the fact that some of the components may be several stories above the ground.
The invention provides improvements over the current state of the art for processing plants for processing granular products.